There Are Many Ways To Hate The Things You Love

Fig. 1. Sam Riley (as Ian Curtis) in Control - d. Anton Corbijn, 2007


'People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.'

Elias Canetti

Addendum #1: Music Video (click)

Joy Division - Transmission

Addendum #2: The Sunday Six (Relatively Recent)

Fig. 1. Mohamed Bourouissa - La fenêtre, 2005

Fig. 2. Mona Hatoum - Nature morte aux grenades, 2006-07

Fig. 3. Jeff Koons - Girl with Dolphin and Monkey, 2006

Fig. 4. Doug Aitken - Migration (still), 2008

Fig. 5. Gottfried Helnwein - Red Mouse 2, 2008

Fig. 6. Wim Delvoye - Torre, 2009

A Bridge Of Flesh Between The Mind And Its Others

Fig. 1. Hannes Schüpbach - Toccata (video still), 2002


'The artist ... has never lost his original function and establishes the unity of the ultimate by reducing all phenomena to the terms of the sensual. For sensuality is the one basic human quality necessary for the appreciation of all truth.'

Marl Rothko

Eugene and Caspar Jump Through Plato's Window

Fig. 1. Caspar David Friedrich - Sunrise over the Sea, c. 1826


EDMUND: You've just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They're all connected with the sea. Here's one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself - actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! ... Then another time, on the American line, when I was lookout on the crow's nest in the dawn watch. A clam sea, that time. Only a lazy groundswell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which sleep together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came, the peace, the end of the quest, the last harbour, the joy of belonging to a fulfilment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see - and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! (He grins wryly.) It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a sea-gull or fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!

From Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill

The Sunday Six: Bill Viola - Ocean Without A Shore, 2007 (video installation)

Fig. 2a. & 2b.

Addendum #1:

Interview with Bill Viola at the Venice Biennale, 2007 (TateShots)

Addendum #2: Katie (thanks!) and ESVM's poetry corner...

Even though I live close to the Pacific ocean, seeing this Friedrich and reading the O'Neill passage (I so need to re-read Long Day's Journey!) make me think of the Atlantic ocean, and how much the sea meant to my Grandfather. I'm sure he had a similar sense of a bigger belonging when out at sea.

I'll lay off the ESVM for a while as I'm sure you're tiring of her, but she had such strong feelings about her beloved Maine coast, and I think she and Edmund would have been a good match:

Inland

People that build their houses inland,
People that buy a plot of ground
Shaped like a house, and build a house there,
Far from the sea-board, far from the sound

Of water sucking the hollow ledges,
Tons of water striking the shore, -
What do they long for, as I long for
One salt smell of the sea once more?

People the waves have not awakened,
Spanking the boats at the harbour's head,
What do they long for, as I long for, -
Starting up in my inland bed,

Beating the narrow walls, and finding
Neither a window nor a door,
Screaming to God for death by drowning, -
One salt taste of the sea once more?

Addendum #3: Anonymous' (thanks!) poetry corner...

L'Homme et la mer

Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer!
La mer est ton miroir; tu contemples ton âme
Dans le déroument infini de sa lame,
Et ton esprit n'est pas un gouffre moins amer

Tu te plais à plonger au sein de ton image;
Tu l'embrasses des yeux et des bras, et ton coeur
Se distrait quelquefois de sa propre rumeur
Au bruit de cette plainte indomptable et sauvage.

Vous êtes tous les deux ténébreux et discrets:
Homme, nul n'a sondé le fond de tes abimes;
O mer, nul ne connait tes richesses intimes,
Tant vous êtes jaloux de garder vos secrets!

Et cependant voilà des siècles innombrables
Que vous vous combattez sans pitié ni remord,
Tellement vous aimez le carnage et la mort,
O lutteurs éternels, ô frères implacables!

Charles Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du Mal)

The Eternal Recurrence Of M. Marcel Duchamp

The Sunday Six #7: Relatively "Now"

Fig. 1. Ori Gersht - Still from Pomegranate, 2006

Fig. 2. Gao Xingjian - Lightning, 2006

Fig. 3. Jean-Louis Schuller - Dis-Connection I Shanghai, 2007

Fig. 4. Jürg Hassler - Slaver, 2007

Fig. 5. Dirk Pauwels - The Absence of Mark Manders, 2008

Fig. 6. Mark Leckey - Cinema In The Round, 2007/08

'I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.'

Marcel Duchamp

Addendum #1: An Art History Lesson - Nothing More

Interview with Marcel Duchamp: Part One

Interview with Marcel Duchamp: Part Two

Links:

Marcel Duchamp In His Own Words: Part 1
Marcel Duchamp In His Own Words: Part 2
Marcel Duchamp In His Own Words: Part 3

Addendum #2: An Art History Lesson - Nothing Less

Marcel Duchamp - Anémic Cinéma, 1926 (with contemporary soundtrack)

Illusion Travels By Any, And Every, Means Available

Fig. 1. Hiraki Sawa - Dwelling (still), 2002


'One question revolves around the relationship between the anticipation of travel and its reality. I came upon a copy of J-K Huysmans's novel A Rebours, published in 1884, whose effete and misanthropic hero, the aristocratic Duc des Esseintes, anticipated a journey to London and offered in the process an extravagantly pessimistic analysis of the difference between what we imagine of a place and what can occur when we reach it.

Huysmans recounts that the Duc des Esseintes lived alone in a vast villa on the outskirts of Paris. He rarely went anywhere to avoid what he took to be the ugliness and stupidity of others. One afternoon in his youth, he had ventured into a nearby village for a few hours and had felt his detestation of people grow fierce. Since then he had chosen to spend his days alone in bed in his study, reading the classics of literature and moulding acerbic thoughts about humanity. However, early one morning, the Duc surprised himself by an intense wish to travel to London. The desire came upon him as he sat by the fire reading a volume of Dickens. The book evoked visions of English life which he contemplated at length and grew increasingly keen to see. Unable to withhold his excitement, he ordered his servants to pack his bags, dressed himself in a grey tweed suit, a pair of laced ankle boots, a little bowler hat and a flax-blue Inverness cape and took the next train to Paris. Because he had time to spare before the departure of the London train, he went to Galignani's English bookshop on the Rue de Rivoli and there bought a volume of Baedeker's Guide to London. He was thrown into delicious reveries by its terse descriptions of London's attractions. He moved on to a wine bar nearby frequented by a large English clientele. The atmosphere was out of Dickens and he thought of scenes where Little Dorrit, Dora Copperfield and Tom Pinch's sister Ruth sat in similarly cosy, bright rooms. One customer had Mr Wickfield's white hair and ruddy complexion and the sharp, expressionless features and unfeeling eyes of Mr Tulkinghorn.

Hungry, Des Esseintes went next to an English tavern in the Rue d'Amsterdam, near the Gare Saint Lazare. It was dark and smoky there, with a line of beer pulls along a counter, which was spread with hams as brown as violins and lobsters the colour of red lead. Seated at small wooden tables were robust Englishmen with boyish faces, teeth as big as palette knives, cheeks as red as apples and long hands and feet. Des Esseintes found a table and ordered some oxtail soup, a smoked haddock, a helping of roast beef and potatoes, a couple of pints of ale and a chunk of salmon.

However, as the moment to board his train approached, along with the chance to turn dreams of London into reality, Des Esseintes was abruptly overcome with lassitude. He thought how wearing it would be actually to go to London, how he would have to run to the station, fight for a porter, board the train, endure an unfamiliar bed, stand in queues, feel cold and move his fragile frame around the sights that Baedeker had so tersely described - and thus soil his dreams. 'What was the good of moving when a person could travel so wonderfully sitting in a chair? Wasn't he already in London, whose smells, weather, citizens, food, and even cutlery were all about him? What could he expect to find over there except fresh disappointments?' Still seated at his table, he reflected, 'I must have been suffering from some mental aberration to have rejected the visions of my obedient imagination and to have believed like any old ninny that it was necessary, interesting and useful to travel abroad.'

So Des Esseintes paid the bill, left the tavern and took the first train back to his villa, along with his trunks, his packages, his portmanteaux, his rugs, his umbrellas and his sticks - and never left home again.'

Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel)

Addendum: Katie has again submitted a response to one of my entries in the form of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, which I am happy to post.

Travel

The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn't a train goes by all day
But I hear it's whistle shrieking.

All night there isn't a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.

My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I'll not be knowing;
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
No matter where it's going.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Sunday Six: Part Two (Relatively Eclectic)

Fig. 1. Ivan Moudov - Fragments, 2003 - 2004

Fig. 2. Raymond Pettibon - No title (I've often lamented), 2004

Fig. 3. Bill Viola - Without A Shore (still), 2007

Fig. 4. Johanna Calle - Tejido Foliar (detail), 2008

Fig. 5. Phillip Adams (choreographer) - Axeman's Lullaby, 2008 (photo by Jeff Busby)

Fig. 6. Peter Fischli & David Weiss - Parts of a Film with Rat and a Bear, 2008.

'Think like a man of action and act like a man of thought.'

Henri Bergson

The Anatomy of Anguish

Fig. 1. Jordan Wolfson - Infinite Melancholy (4 minutes), 2003

'For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia. I am trying to address the abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claim upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself. Such despair is not a revulsion that would imply my being capable of desire and creativity, negative indeed but present. Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic - it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.

Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, and renunciation?

Fig. 2. Still from Afterschool - d. Antonio Campos, 2008

All this gives me another life. A life that is unlivable, heavy with daily sorrows, tears held back or shed, a total despair, scorching at times, then wan and empty. In short, a devitalised existence that, although occasionally fired by the effort I make to prolong it, is ready at any moment for a plunge into death. An avenging death or a liberating death, it is henceforth the inner threshold of my despondency, the impossible meaning of a life whose burden constantly seems un- bearable, save for those moments when I pull myself together and face up to the disaster. I live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverised, my rhythm slowed down or interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed into sorrow. . . . Absent from other people's meaning, alien, accidental with respect to native happiness, I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to my depression. On the frontiers of life and death, occasionally I have the arrogant feeling of being witness to the meaninglessness of Being, of revealing the absurdity of bonds and beings.

Fig. 3. Ron Mueck - Mask II, 2001-2

My pain is the hidden side of my philosophy, its mute sister. In the same way, Montaigne's statement "To philosophise is to learn how to die" is inconceivable without the melancholy combination of sorrow and hatred - which came to a head in Heidegger's care and the disclosure of "being-for-death". Without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play.'

Julia Kristeva (Black Sun)

Your Ears Will Orgasm #4: Betty Davis - Nasty Gal, 1975 (MixPod Player)